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Leaves from a Field Note-Book by John Hartman Morgan
page 98 of 229 (42%)
MORT POUR LA PATRIE.


The sun was fast declining over the chalk hills and it grew bitter cold.
I unfolded my camera, stepped back eight paces, and pressed the trigger.
We clambered back into the car and resumed the road to Meaux. As I
looked over my shoulder the last things I saw in the enfolding twilight
were those little flags still fluttering wistfully in the wind.




XIII

MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS


We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments
of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal
reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at
Oxford, I had studied the troubled times of Étienne Marcel in the
treasures of the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, and I knew every
kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiègne,
Senlis--they called to my mind dreamy hours in the dim religious light
of muniment-rooms and days of ecstasy among the pages of Froissart.
Little did I think when I read those belligerent chronicles in the
sequestered alcoves of the Bodleian and the Bibliothèque Nationale,
tracing out the warlike dispositions of Charles the Bad and the Dauphin
and the Provost of the Merchants, that the day would come when I would
be traversing these very fields engaged in detective enterprises upon
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